Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

We can’t give
up hope, Marybeth
. But give up Hope is exactly what they
did, over and over again.
The doctors ordered my parents to stop trying; they
refused. They are not quitters. They tried and tried, and
finally came me. My mother didn’t count on my being alive,
couldn’t bear to think of me as an actual baby, a living child,
a girl who would get to come home. I would have been
Hope 8, if things had gone badly. But I entered the world

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hollering – an electric, neon pink. My parents were so
surprised, they realized they’d never discussed a name, not
a real one, for a real child. For my first two days in the
hospital, they didn’t name me. Each morning my mother
would hear the door to her room open and feel the nurse
lingering in the doorway (I always pictured her vintage, with
swaying white skirts and one of those folded caps like a
Chinese take-out box). The nurse would linger, and my
mother would ask without even looking up, ‘Is she still
alive?’
When I remained alive, they named me Amy, because
it was a regular girl’s name, a popular girl’s name, a name
a thousand other baby girls were given that year, so maybe
the Gods wouldn’t notice this little baby nestled among the
others. Marybeth said if she were to do it again, she’d
name me Lydia.
I grew up feeling special, proud. I was the girl who
battled oblivion and won. The chances were about 1
percent, but I did it. I ruined my mother’s womb in the
process – my own prenatal Sherman’s March. Marybeth
would never have another baby. As a child, I got a vibrant
pleasure out of this: just me, just me, only me.
My mother would sip hot tea on the days of the Hopes’
birth-deaths, sit in a rocker with a blanket, and say she was
just ‘taking a little time for myself.’ Nothing dramatic, my
mother is too sensible to sing dirges, but she would get
pensive, she would remove herself, and I would have none
of it, needful thing that I was. I would clamber onto my
mother’s lap, or thrust a crayoned drawing in her face, or
remember a permission slip that needed prompt attention.
My father would try to distract me, try to take me to a movie

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or bribe me with sweets. No matter the ruse, it didn’t work. I
wouldn’t give my mother those few minutes.
I’ve always been better than the Hopes, I was the one
who made it. But I’ve always been jealous too, always –
seven dead dancing princesses. They get to be perfect
without even trying, without even facing one moment of
existence, while I am stuck here on earth, and every day I
must try, and every day is a chance to be less than perfect.
It’s an exhausting way to live. I lived that way until I was
thirty-one.
And then, for about two years, everything was okay.
Because of Nick.
Nick 
loved
me. A six-o kind of love: He 
looooooved
me. But he didn’t love me, me. Nick loved a girl who
doesn’t exist. I was pretending, the way I often did,
pretending to have a personality. I can’t help it, it’s what I’ve
always done: The way some women change fashion
regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good,
what’s coveted, what’s 
au courant
? I think most people do
this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one
persona because they’re too lazy or stupid to pull off a
switch.
That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl
who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool
Girl. Men always say that as 
the
defining compliment, don’t
they? 
She’s a cool girl
. Being the Cool Girl means I am a
hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty
jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap
beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs
and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the
world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow

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maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.
Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they
only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men
do whatever they want. 
Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind,
I’m the Cool Girl
.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled
because so many women are willing to pretend to be this
girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see
men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these
awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down
and calmly say: 
You are not dating a woman, you are
dating a woman who has watched too many movies written
by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this
kind of woman exists and might kiss them
. I’d want to grab
the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: 
The
bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one
loves chili dogs that much!
And the Cool Girls are even
more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the
woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman
a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re 
not
a Cool Girl, I
beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool
Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a
vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with
dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a
tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are
variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants
Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking
thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you
know you’re 
not
Cool Girl? Because he says things like: ‘I
like strong women.’ If he says that to you, he will at some
point fuck someone else. Because ‘I like strong women’ is

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code for ‘I hate strong women.’)
I waited patiently – 
years
– for the pendulum to swing
the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn
how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook